After a teenager’s death, a tiny Mississippi town confronts certainly one of racism’s earliest taboos.
- By Scott Baldauf Staff author of The Christian Science Track
A talented football player, a church-going son who always wore a smile by all accounts, Raynard Johnson was a good kid: a straight-A student.
Then when the senior high school junior ended up being discovered hanging from the pecan tree, simply actions from their entry way, this mixed-race community in rural Mississippi discovered itself confronted by uncomfortable concerns: Did Raynard commit committing committing suicide, as being a coroner’s report recommends? Or was he lynched by somebody who disapproved of their dating girls that are white?
“He would not hang himself, for me,” claims Curtis Johnson, a relative, sitting at a picnic dining dining dining table in their front that is shady garden. “He was enjoying life too well.”
With Raynard’s household doubting the report that is official along with the NAACP investing in an exclusive detective to check to the son’s death – the problems of battle and interracial relationship are all of a sudden looming big in a town where white and black colored real time side by side and work, worship, and seafood together.
“You go fully into the food 
store, and folks state, ‘How ya doin’?’ whether you are black or white,” claims Craig Robbins, superintendent associated with neighborhood college region. “If someone has difficulty on the highway – I don’t care exactly exactly exactly what battle it really is – people stop which help them.”
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However in Marion County, as with many rural corners of America, interracial relationship nevertheless generally seems to engender some opposition.
“this is actually the last great bogeyman, the past great taboo,” claims Mark Potok of this Southern Poverty Law Center, a hate-group watchdog in Montgomery, Ala. The Ku Klux Klan’s original charter, he notes, would be to “protect white ladies’ chastity” after the emancipation of slaves.
But Mr. Potok is fast to include that lingering opposition to racial blending is certainly not unique towards the south.
Nationwide, marriages of black colored and white partners have actually increased nearly sevenfold since the 1960s, from 51,000 couples in 1960 to 340,000 in 1996. Interracial marriages now total 1.5 million, however these partners have a tendency to focus in cities more tolerant of changing mores that are social.
Buddies say Raynard’s easy-going color-blindness could have confronted the difficult legacy of segregation.
“People do not accept of interracial dating,” states Eddie Conerly, a young African-American neighbor from Kokomo, whom knew Raynard at school and today has a vehicle clean in Columbia, the county chair. “the only path it’s planning to alter occurs when the great Lord comes. Then it will not be a black colored or white thing.”
Relatives state Raynard had been dating a girl that is white few days before he passed away, but stopped if the girl’s uncle turned up during the Johnson household and voiced their disapproval. Quickly later, Raynard had been found hanging from a tree, a baseball limit nevertheless on their mind.
Their death has drawn wide, if notably unwanted, nationwide awareness of this separated corner of southwestern Mississippi. FBI detectives and television teams from over the state have actually descended around town, interviewing relatives and buddies users alike. The Rev. Jesse Jackson talked at Raynard’s funeral this morning monday.
While using the concerns, tensions are increasing in this gentle landscape of pine trees and red-earth rolling hills, of a drive that is two-hour of brand new Orleans. Following the 17-year-old’s death, the area paper published a photograph of racist graffiti spray-painted on a nearby connection – really general public proof that some nasty racial undercurrents persist under the placid area of Marion County.
“This has got the prospective to divide the community, and no one desires to note that happen,” states the Rev. Barry Dickerson, pastor for the United Methodist church in Columbia, whoever church has met along with other Methodist churches, grayscale, to help keep the lines of interaction available. “the task regarding the Christian is always to love. We should continue steadily to love each other and work for justice aswell.”
After Raynard’s death, a coroner’s report found “marks in line with committing suicide but there was clearly no proof of accidents from the battle.”
Users of the man that is young family, though, say a few concerns went unanswered. They note, by way of example, that the gear Raynard had been discovered hanging from will not fit in with him, and it belongs to that they don’t know who. In addition they observe that the person whom approached Raynard about dating their niece is a sheriff that is former Department prison guard.
Meanwhile, neighborhood police force is continuing to analyze. “I’m yes the agents hear every thing, and I also cannot imagine they would not followup on every thing,” claims assistant district attorney Hal Kittrell.
The Johnson household, meanwhile, has authorized an autopsy that is second, with the aid of civil liberties groups, has retained an attorney and a personal investigator to be certain every lead is pursued.
Rip Daniels, place manager of WJZD, A african-american-owned news radio place in Gulfport, Miss., states such actions are understandable, provided Mississippi’s historic and frequently violent resistance towards the civil legal rights motion for the 1950s and ’60s. In which he does not think it really is uncommon that Raynard’s human body revealed no indications of battle.
“Have a look at these images,” he states, leafing through an accumulation of commemorative postcards of lynchings in James Allen’s guide, “Without Sanctuary.” web web Page after gruesome web web web page shows photos of black colored guys hanging. Some have actually their fingers bound. Other people do not.
“People ask, ‘How can they be therefore docile? How comen’t they fight?’ ” Mr. Daniels places the guide down. “an individual holds a weapon to the head, in addition they threaten family Raynard had been caring for a mentally disabled relative on the night time he died, you certainly will do almost anything, will not you?”
Vicki Dillistone, Raynard’s Spanish teacher, claims news of their death additionally the chance of committing committing suicide surprised many instructors, because “he always had that not-a-care-in-the-world smile.”
While she acknowledges that no community is wholly without any racism, she hopes that regardless of the upshot of the actual situation, Marion County can come back to the peaceful, trusting, friendly city she is constantly known that it is. “I would personally hate to observe that modification through individual stupidity, if as it happens to be homicide instead of committing committing suicide.”
(c) Copyright 2000. The Christian Science Publishing Community
